Weekly Update: February 18 - 24, 2019

Feb 24, 2019

After reading two chapters of Code Complete 2 each day this week, I’m 30 chapters in and nearly done with the book. I wouldn’t say that the book is changing my world, but it’s definitely reaffirming lessons I’ve already learned, shedding new light on problems I hadn’t considered, and polishing a lot of concepts I’ve read or heard about in less formal settings. So far the book has provided an amazing survey of software delivery techniques and ideas and I’m blown away by its breadth. It’s amazing the book was published back in 2004 and how so much of the advice is just as applicable today as it was back then. Many of the ideas and tooling around them have evolved a bit since 2004 but reading this book back then must have been like reading the future. I just looked at the book’s Amazon page and it mentions that Steve McConnell, the author of Code Complete 2, is releasing a new book this spring. It’s titled More Effective Agile: A Roadmap for Leaders and I’m looking forward to it. Hopefully this new book will be every bit as prescient as Code Complete 2.

For courses, I watched Building a Full Stack App with React and Express on Pluralsight. It was good but I watched it passively. I haven’t been doing much React of late, so it was a good refresher on some of the patterns that come around building an app using it. My biggest takeaway from the course is that I want to research redux-saga some more. I’ve used redux-thunk before with redux to handle data fetching, but would like to get a toy example set up using redux-saga. The redux-saga docs mention that it avoids callback hell, is easily testable, and keeps actions pure, unlike redux-thunk.

Currents

On the Next…

This is the week that I will finally finish Code Complete 2. If I continue to read two chapters each day, I will finish up the book on Wednesday. That’ll be a great step forward in completing a major piece of my planned reading in 2019. Even though I’ll be crossing Code Complete 2 off the list, I’ll be adding a couple of books to my reading list (The Psychology of Computer Programming, Programming on Purpose) thanks to Code Complete 2. I’m excited to read these new books, they’re old but should be filled with wisdom.

Dev-eryday

Dev-every is a personal project created by Joshua Niederer to aid in becoming a better software developer. The concept is to develop myself and my skills every day. This site serves to log my efforts and to share knowledge, creations, insights, and whatever else I discover along the way.